(One More) Review of The Rebel Sell by risa
The Rebel Sell, by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.
Reviewed by Risa Dickens.
The Rebel Sell (my favorite Christmas present this year) takes everybody down a notch, and then asks them to stop with the hifalutin calls for “deeper” change. The authors argue that there is a pervasive and misleading myth in North America – a story about how this culture (popular culture, mass culture) is flawed and how only a more refined, deep, thorough, legitimate culture can make life meaningful. Unlike most of cultural studies, they do not blame advertising.
Rather than point their unified finger at the usual commercial culprits, the authors rake “No Logo” author Naomi Klein over the coals, and lots of other culture jammer leftist hero people too. Rebell Sell is very cool, I hafta say. It’s a great read, it makes your brain work on complex stuff, but then its surprisingly honest and funny. They say lots of stuff that I’d champion and lots that I’d argue another way. They’ve brushed a lot of people the wrong way, mostly, I think, because subtle arguments don’t translate well into snappy blog posts or witty reviews.
The authors- two cute philosophy/ethics doctors- explain the prisoners dilemma well and then show how it applies all over the place. How, just trying to save our own skins, or to compete with the Joneses, we end up in situations where we’re effectively collaborating on making life worse. (energy consumption being their big example). They think culture jamming- which is still very hot with the alt-media crowd- and the rest of what they call “the counterculture” is at best just more “product”, and at its worst, self-indulgent. Counterculture can propose practical alternative methods but too often it becomes a way of letting yourself believe that your choices are purer, better, and more authentic then anyone else’s. For example, they make fun of Klein for bemoaning the yuppies who move into her hot property in Toronto and who don’t have real converted lofts like hers. They’re awesomely snarky, especially in the afterward:
“Buying organic food is not ethical consumption.
This is the part that we were not clear about. The reason we made fun of organic vegetables is that we don’t believe that buying organic is a case of genuinely ethical consumption. To be clear, there are all sorts of bad practices in agriculture, and targeting consumption in such a way as to discourage those bad practices and deny profits to those who engage in them is an excellent idea.(…) The ideology of the organic food movement is based in ‘60s countercultural technophobia, and not in any sober assessment of the environmental impact and sustainability of agricultural practices . Thus it has more in common with the alternative medicine movement then it does the environmental movement (including its popular appeal based on false and unconscionable health claims). Organic food is yuppy food, in our view, because the extra cost buys nothing more than distinction and an unfounded sense of moral superiority (unlike buying a hybrid, which costs more because it reduces the amount of atmospheric pollution that other people must breathe.)”
This is fun stuff to debate at family reunions, eh?
More to the heart of the argument, Heath and Potter demonstrate the power of the price system to regulate behavior, and they make the quaintly realistic suggestion that improvements might be made to the systems we live in by working on the systems themselves.
They basically call for a focus on the state, and on the development of “arms control treaties” – ie collective agreements to give up certain freedoms- for all levels of collective problems. I guess, in a way, they suggest that where there is potential for escalation there is also potential for a negotiated, systematized solution. They are also both ‘avid Linux users’ so you know I like to make much of that.
Anyway, read it, lemme know what you think.
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